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Ted Cruz's Worst Nightmare Is Coming True

Last August, as conservatives barnstormed the country seeking to build support for a cockamamie plan to shut down the U.S. federal government unless Congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator, said something surprisingly prescient about the president’s signature health-care law.

“President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound,” he said. The worry, according to Cruz, was that once the ACA went into effect, we’d all be “addicted to the sugar.” Then, it would be too late to roll it back.

Cruz’s nightmare, and the left’s long-held dream, has come true. Finally, after years of failed reform efforts, the U.S. government is actually trying to provide affordable health coverage for all. And it’s working, despite Republicans’ relentless attempts to deep-six the law. As a result, the politics of Obamacare will never be the same.

The right’s biggest fear was never really, as Cruz’s comments revealed, that Obamacare wouldn’t succeed. It was that it would.

Americans, it turns out, have a compelling desire for a basic necessity of life: affordable health coverage. That’s why, despite the HealthCare.gov debacle, and campaigns in red states to discourage enrollment and defund outreach efforts, eight million Americans signed up. Young people ignored tasteless ads and anti-Obamacare campus beer parties, funded by the Koch brothers, to enroll at strong enough rates. Millions more enrolled in Medicaid, even in states that did not expand the program, as awareness of coverage options increased. There is even a big upswing in take-up of employer coverage, despite GOP claims that Obamacare would destroy the employer-based system. The Congressional Budget Office just lowered its estimate of the law’s costs, and overall health-care inflation is at historic lows. It’s been a tough few weeks for the Obamacare-bashers.

In fact, the law’s success reverses the political calculus: Those who advocate repeal can be rightly accused of taking away health coverage from some 15 million Americans. Although some of these are low-income people, less likely to vote, many others are middle-income people who are surprised and relieved at having access to good, affordable health coverage – including, by the way, a lot of Republicans.

My favorite ACA success story is of an Ohio Republican woman profiled in Time. Republicans could say she was forced to cancel her coverage and is now paying more. But the real story is that her canceled coverage did not pay for the life-saving cancer care her husband needed. Overcoming “a lot of talk that this is a bad law,” she enrolled through HealthCare.gov and is paying a little more now for health coverage that is actually covering her husband’s cancer care. She went from “I don’t want anything to do with it [Obamacare]” to saying it is “a godsend.”

Recent polling shows that support for repeal is shrinking to the most conservative voters, key to Republican primaries but not enough to win most statewide general elections. When given a choice of whether to repeal the ACA or keep it intact or with small modifications, a recent Bloomberg poll found, only a third of Americans (34 percent) chose repeal. That’s about the same proportion who have favorable views of the Tea Party.

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Which may be why the new anti-ACA ads being run by a Koch brothers-funded group against Democratic Senate candidates in several states do not call for repeal. The ads take a populist, anti-insurance company approach usually used by Democrats. One ad in Iowa targets the Democratic Senate candidate, Rep. Bruce Braley, for taking “tens of thousands from his friends in the health insurance industry.” Rather than calling for outright repeal of the law, the ad says simply, “stop supporting Obamacare.”

But the intensity is still, admittedly, on the side of opponents, who care more about the issue and are more likely to vote – especially in a low-turnout contest like the 2014 midterms. For Democrats to take advantage of the ACA’s success on the ground, they must both make it a motivating issue for their base and reach out to independents, who remain skeptical about the law.

In 2010, Democrats made the unforgivable mistake of not answering GOP attacks on Obamacare, mostly aimed at seniors. In truth, Democrats designed the ACA to quickly deliver Medicare benefits to seniors, in the form of lower prescription-drug costs and free preventive care. But instead of campaigning on that, Democrats allowed Republicans to scare seniors about cuts in Medicare. (Never mind that Republicans were simultaneously complaining about the law’s supposedly exorbitant costs or that House budget keeps these cuts.)

Richard Kirsch is senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and senior adviser to USAction, which advocates for universal health care. He is the author of Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States.